Where Did Affordable OCR Go?

Goeland86 asks: "Has OCR (Optical Character Recognition) died down? Where have all the magical programs that translate your handwriting to office compatible files gone? Most of the windows programs nowadays are either expensive (ReadIris Pro 9 about $400) and not that many OSS projects for OCR have released a recent update (Kognition was last updated on July 17th 2003 according to Freshmeat). Has everyone already scanned/translated all of their paper files? Has OCR outlived its use, or is it just a fancy technology that hit a dead end in terms of the market? Have Slashdot readers used it? If so, are you still using it? If not, why?"

Comments

ocr and pdf

[i621148]

i think that pdf's and the availability of the free adobe viewer have pretty much obsoleted ocr.
ocr has to be babysat also. it is not 100% reliable like scanning to pdf is...

Free OCR?

[Asprin]

So far as I can tell, NON-free OCR isn't doing so hot either -- you pretty much have to proof-read and correct everything you scan anyway, which just makes it impractical for most purposes. If I had to scan a bunch of records, I'd probably outsource it to a pay service that specializes in that sort of thing, which means it would have to be worth the cost of getting it done.

What I want to know is what's Google going to do about this? They have a catalog search in their Google Labs playpen that indexes products and their descriptions to make them searchable. ...and by searchable, I mean you can search for "bicycle" and it will highlight all of the instances of that word in some 200+ PRINTED catalogs, not similar HTML/XML/PDF electronic documents. So clearly, they know some things about OCR we don't (and probably 2D map indexing, too), but durned if they aren't letting on about it.

In the next few years, I expect to see a fully automated Google OCR product that can not only scan your paper docs, but index them and help you search them too, all while maintaining the electronic copies in their original scanned (think photograph) state, not the some bastardized, mistranslated and screwed up PDF or DOC format.

**THAT'S** what's going to kill Microsoft, and probably why they're so keen to risk overreaching on their IPO.